Migrating legacy apps to .Net and Java 'too costly'

Consultancy advises looking at application transformation services.

The manual reprogramming of legacy applications to Java and the .Net framework is slow, costly and risky, an IT consultancy firm warned today.

While manual redevelopments are costly and unnecessary, and conversion tools and compilers deliver poor results, companies should instead look at application transformation services, according to consultancy firm Northdoor.

Northdoor evaluated a number of transformation tools aimed at supporting migrations from fourth-generation languages such as PowerBuilder, Gupta/Centura, Oracle Forms, Visual Basic 6, RPG and Delphi.

The company believes that transformation consultancies can deliver migrations at about 20 per cent of the cost and time needed to conduct manual recoding.

Transformation consultancies use a combination of automated tools and hands-on expertise.

Northdoor also warned that skills shortages are making legacy applications costly to maintain, and that such languages are becoming limited in their support for the business when compared to .Net and Java, providing more incentives to migrate.

"We estimate that up to 90 per cent of application development budgets are actually spent on maintaining legacy applications," said David Ballard, consultancy director at Northdoor.

"By using application transformation services, organisations can migrate core applications to modern environments cost-effectively and quickly, saving them millions when compared to the costs of the typical technique of manual recoding."

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